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The Knockout Stages

June 26th, 2010 · 4 Comments

I’m going to do this as quick as possible because of the computer caused delay.

Here’s the new ratings including all games as of the end of the Group Stages (though not counting the just completed game between Uruguay and South Korea). The two biggest things to note here is Italy dropping out of the Top 10 and Argentina edging past England into fourth place.

Here’s the table with the chances of each team going out at each stage. These are not sims as the results can now be calculated directly since goal differentials no longer complicate things. I’ll make a few comments below on this.

And here are the goal predictions and advancement chances for all eight of the Group of 16 matches. Slovakia is the biggest underdog against the Dutch. The English and the Germans have the closest matchup:

Team            Goals    Advance%
Uruguay          1.44      66.53%
Korea Republic   0.85      33.47%

USA              1.44      59.66%
Ghana            1.08      40.34%

Netherlands      2.21      84.75%
Slovakia         0.68      15.25%

Brazil           1.90      78.46%
Chile            0.76      21.54%

Mexico           1.17      38.02%
Argentina        1.63      61.98%

England          1.42      54.02%
Germany          1.27      45.98%

Japan            0.89      42.17%
Paraguay         1.15      57.83%

Portugal         0.81      36.16%
Spain            1.28      63.84%

All of these numbers are _before_ the outcome of the Uruguay/South Korea match. I’d have loved to gotten this in ahead of that game, but the Blue Screen of Death has no mercy. You’ll have to trust me that I didn’t thumb the scales any.

My American team looks like they would make the semis roughly 1 in 4 tries. Considering the semis are more or less uncharted territory for us, that’s fine with me. Fingers crossed for the match later today.

A lot has been made about the difficulty Germany and England face due to the draw, but the reality is that it’s done Argentina no favors either. They’ve got to get through two top 10 teams just to get to the semis where they potentially could face Spain.

The odds for the Brazilians and Dutch have both gone up considerably due to a favorable draw. Chile drew the short straw and must try and deal with Brazil.

As others have mentioned, this tournament has been tough on both Africa and Europe. Europe will only have three teams in the quarterfinals and Ghana is Africa’s last hope. Impressively, every South American team advanced to the knockout stages.

The tournament is predicted to be won 61.2% of the time by either Brazil, Spain or the Netherlands. No other team cracked 8%.

Enjoy.

Tags: Soccer!! · South Africa 2010 · Uncategorized

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 tda // Jun 26, 2010 at 8:25 am

    USA USA USA

    IF USA advances, I think the match against Uruguay will be terrific. Uru is playing so well. What a challenging matchup.

    Ghana are no slouches either though. Must have spectacular games from Dempsey and Donovan!

  • 2 Amir // Jun 27, 2010 at 12:41 pm

    I think I came into conclusion about the major improvement that needs to be done – when the score is not level, there are many more goals (a factor of about 1.5 – it should be derived from actual data).
    The simulation and the rankings should take that into account.
    So, for example, if team A beat team B by 2:0 when the first goal was scored in the 30th minute, so the number of goal it has scored for the rankings would be 2 goal per 120 minutes when level (30 + 1.5*60).
    Then the simulation would be done using Exponential Distribution.
    I guess it would take a bit of work and testing to be done, but I believe it would suit the game of football much better.

  • 3 Ken Houghton // Jun 28, 2010 at 8:03 am

    If you used the original projections, the only “upset” so far is Ghana over the US. (That is, choose the team with the higher number of times of making the Quarters as the winner of the match.)

    If you use these projections, Germany over England has become an upset.

    What changed? (The other match that “flipped” is Portugal-Spain, and that may have been distorted by the high relative probability of Portugal getting to the Round of 16.)

  • 4 Daniel // Jun 29, 2010 at 1:32 pm

    WC Top 10:
    5 from South American
    3 from European
    1 from Africa
    1 from Asia

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